The Mozilla oral arguments and the ongoing hell of the “net neutrality” debate

In the opening seconds of what was surely one of the worst oral arguments in a high-profile case that I have ever heard, Pantelis Michalopoulos, arguing for petitioners against the FCC’s 2018 Restoring Internet Freedom Order (RIFO) expertly captured both why the side he was representing should lose and the overall absurdity of the entire net neutrality debate: “This order is a stab in the heart of the Communications Act. It would literally write ‘telecommunications’ out of the law. It would end the communications agency’s oversight over the main communications service of our time.”

The main communications service of our time is the Internet. The Communications and Telecommunications Acts were written before the advent of the modern Internet, for an era when the telephone was the main communications service of our time. The reality is that technological evolution has written “telecommunications” out of these Acts – the “telecommunications services” they were written to regulate are no longer the important communications services of the day.

The basic question of the net neutrality debate is whether we expect Congress to weigh in on how regulators should respond when an industry undergoes fundamental change, or whether we should instead allow those regulators to redefine the scope of their own authority. In the RIFO case, petitioners (and, more generally, net neutrality proponents) argue that agencies should get to define their own authority. Those on the other side of the issue (including me) argue that that it is up to Congress to provide agencies with guidance in response to changing circumstances – and worry that allowing independent and executive branch agencies broad authority to act without Congressional direction is a recipe for unfettered, unchecked, and fundamentally abusive concentrations of power in the hands of the executive branch.